The Elf Queen of Shannara

She left him as they neared the palace gates, letting him go on ahead, tired eyed and stoop shouldered, his thin, rumpled shadow cast against the earth, a mirror of himself. She liked Aurin Striate. He was comfortable and easy in the manner of old clothes. She trusted him. If anyone could see them through the journey that lay ahead, it was the Owl.

She turned away from the palace and wandered absently toward the Gardens of Life. She had not looked for Garth when she had risen, slipping from her room instead to search out the queen. But Ellenroh was nowhere to be found once again, and so she had decided to walk out into the city by herself. Now, her walk completed, she found that she still preferred to be alone. She let her thoughts stray as she entered the deserted Gardens, making her way up the gentle incline toward the Ellcrys, and her thoughts, as they had from the moment she had come awake, gravitated stubbornly toward Gavilan Elessedil. She stopped momentarily, picturing him. When she closed her eyes she could feel him kissing her. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had only been kissed once or twice in her life—always too busy with her training, aloof and unapproachable, caught up in other things, to be bothered with boys. There had been no time for relationships. She had had no interest in them. Why was that? she wondered suddenly. But she knew that she might as well inquire as to why the sky was blue as to question who she had become.

She opened her eyes again and walked on.

When she reached the Ellcrys, she studied it for a time before seating herself within its shade. Gavilan Elessedil. She liked him. Maybe too much. It seemed instinctual, and she distrusted the unexpected intensity of her feelings. She barely knew him, and already she was thinking of him more’ than she should. He had kissed her, and she had welcomed it. Yet it angered her that he was hiding what he knew about the magic and the demons, a truth he refused to share with her, a secret so many of the Elves harbored—Ellenroh, Eowen, and the Owl among them. But she was bothered more by Gavilan’s reticence because he had come to her to proclaim himself a friend, he had promised to answer her questions when she asked them, he had kissed her and she had let him, and despite everything he had gone back on his word. She smoldered inwardly at the betrayal, and yet she found herself anxious to forgive him, to make excuses for him, and to give him a chance to tell her in his own time.

But was it any different with Gavilan than it had been with her grandmother? she asked herself suddenly. Hadn’t she used the same reasoning with both?

Perhaps her feelings for each were not so very different.

The thought troubled her more than she cared to admit, and she shoved it hastily away.

It was still and calm within the Gardens, secluded amid the trees and flower beds, cool and removed beneath the silken covering of the Ellcrys. She let her eyes wander across the blanket of colors that formed the Gardens, studying the way they swept the earth like brush strokes, some short and broad, some thin and curving, borders of brightness that shimmered in the light. Overhead, the sun shone down out of a cloudless blue sky, and the air was warm and sweet smelling. She drank it in slowly, carefully, savoring it, aware as she did so that it would all be gone after tonight, that when the magic of the Loden was invoked she would be cast adrift once more in the wilderness dark of Morrowindl. She had been able to forget for a time the horror that lay beyond the Keel, to block away her memories of the stench of sulfur, the steaming fissures in the crust of lava rock, the swelter of Killeshan’s heat rising off the earth, the darkness and the vog, and the rasps and growls of the demons at hunt. She shivered and hugged herself. She did not want to go back out into it. She felt it waiting like a living thing, crouched down patiently, determined it would have her, certain she must come.

She closed her eyes again and waited for the bad feelings to subside, gathering her determination a little at a time, calming herself, reasoning that she would not be alone, that there would be others with her, that they would all protect one another, and that the journey down out of the mountains would pass quickly and then they would be safe. She had climbed unharmed to Arborlon, hadn’t she? Surely she could go back down again.

And yet her doubts persisted, nagging whispers of warning that echoed in the Addershag’s warning at Grimpen Ward. Beware, Elf-girl. I see danger ahead for you, hard times, and treachery and evil beyond imagining.

Trust no one.

But if she did as the Addershag had advised, if she kept her own counsel and gave heed to no one else, she would be paralyzed. She would be cut off from everyone and she did not think she could survive that.

How much had the Addershag seen of her future? she wondered grimly. How much had she failed to reveal?